Cirba support for Amazon Web Services and Softlayer

Automating Complex Routing & Bursting Decisions to External Cloud
Large enterprises have hundreds of new workload placement requests each month, and yet they currently rely on very rudimentary, manual means of determining which internal or external infrastructure option is an appropriate hosting environment for a given application. Released in January 2014, Cirba’s Reservation Console takes the guesswork out of determining the best execution venue by providing customers with a Hotels.com-like experience for evaluating suitable hosting environments against detailed application requirements for compute, storage and network capacity, software licensing requirements and business and operational policies. This capability is underpinned by a rich web services API, enabling both process-centric and fully-automated workflows.

Now, with support for AWS and IBM Softlayer, the Reservation Console enables broader and more complex hosting decisions. This includes the ability to determine the fit-for-purpose of public clouds for specific workloads, as well as temporary cloud bursting, where customers can effectively leverage external resources for cyclical requirements by identifying which workloads are appropriate to be moved and where.

“Without analytics to assess application requirements against infrastructure capabilities, organisations cannot make smart decisions about how to leverage their own internal infrastructure resources, let alone expand into external cloud,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA.

“Even the most sophisticated spreadsheets and manual processes are fundamentally incapable of answering the complex question of where to host workloads. Cirba automates the process and eliminates hosting risk by ensuring all the critical criteria are considered, including resource utilisation, technical requirements, compliance, redundancy, storage requirements and even software licensing . As organisations drive to become more software-defined, Cirba’s routing and reservation capabilities become essential to operations,” said Hillier.

Gaining Visibility and Control over All Enterprise Workloads
Through its new integration to public clouds, Cirba’s award-winning Control Console is also targeting hybrid scenarios by providing centralised management for enterprise applications across physical, virtual, private cloud and external cloud environments.

For internal infrastructure, Cirba’s Control Console provides an intuitive visualisation of whether sufficient or excess resources exist at the environment, cluster, host and VM, datastore, physical storage, resource pools levels and can automate detailed recommendations to remediate any issues. Users can also achieve application-centric or department-oriented views of the information to ensure appropriate resourcing across business lines.

With the upcoming release, Cirba customers will be able to see applications hosted externally in Amazon AWS and IBM Softlayer infrastructures through this same UI, leveraging policy-based analytics to ensure workloads are hosted in the optimal container sizes, and providing drag-and-drop functionality to determine if, when and how workloads should be brought back in-house.

Hillier added, “Having a centralised policy-based control system for managing hybrid cloud is critical. Determining where a workload should be hosted and how resources are assigned to is fundamental to modern IT infrastructure, and doing this automatically is the very heart of cloud and software-defined operational models. It cannot be left to manual processes, opinions and best guesses.”